My system's had this issue for a few weeks now, it takes a lot of time to start up, after I enter my Windows password it takes a lot of time to get to the desktop and even before the desktop shows up there's a black screen with the cursor on it for about 30 seconds.

I was thinking about getting TuneUp Utilities and running a few processes to get rid of some junk perhaps and enhance the speed, just wondering if there's something that you guys would recommend instead of TuneUp that would work better?

I'd stay away from "Tune-up" programs, often they do more harm than good.

I would run a virus/malware scan first off, then I would evaluate what processes are starting up with your machine, and disable those that are unneeded.

You could do it manually or with free software.

Manually: Disable needless processes via Services.msc (For power users, knowledge of programs that are required to run on the OS required)

Software: I highly recommend Soluto. This particular software will scan your system and give you detailed information on what each process is for. It will then give you the option to disable them from starting up, or leave it be.

In short, this is likely going to boil down to malware or a lot of crapware/bloatware being started with your computer.

I would try what is suggested above, I;ve tried tune up utilities before, didn't seem to make any difference at all.
If what's suggested above didn;t work for me, then I would just backup important stuff and format.

Tune-Up Utilities has really messed up a couple of systems I've worked on a few times. I use CCleaner, auslogics defrag, and of course, malwarebytes to see me thru. I've got Webroot SecureAnywhere installed as my AV, but only because I won a 2 year license in a contest, one year of which, I stuck to MSE, until I started seeing average joe's computers with MSE installed infested with malware and rootkits. Malwarebytes' rootkit scanner is another one of my fav's to use. There's so many tools/choices out there....but usually, just doing a little manual routine maintenance does wonders. Cleanmgr=still one of my favs. Kept my system running clean for years (literally).Of course, newer versions of windows has helped in the manual clean up your system process....but I guess I'm old school in that regard, lol! YMMV.(KoshyJohn(dot)com has a lot of nice, nifty little applications as well...worth a read if you're bored).

As others have said, stay away from tune-up utilities. Just disable select startup services. if that does not help, then it is probably a hardware issue. How old is the HDD on your system? There might be a lot of bad sectors on the HDD, causing the system to slow down while trying to read/write data.

Regardless of how old or how young a hard drive is, it can always develop bad sectors. If it's a laptop, one thing you can do which is a poor man's sector scan is put your ear on the palm reset of the laptop when it seems stuck. If you hear the laptop making the same sound over and over it usually indicates it's try to read a bad sector, that being said if you really want to know I would recommend a scan with spinrite.

I would also go into the programs and feature list and do a search for the word search or toolbar or bar and remove any dodgy toolbars like bing bar or mywebsearch that may have got onto the system.

Which AV do you use? Avast? I've seen Avast cause the 30 second black screen of death a few times.

If you do a malware scan the 3 I would highly recommend is malwarebytes, hitman pro and tdsskiller (for rootkits)

If you do a malware scan the 3 I would highly recommend is malwarebytes, hitman pro and tdsskiller (for rootkits)

is that all 3 or any 1?

Also thanks to marshal for recommending soluto, i just tried it out and its great. i managed to cut my boot time by 38 seconds It let me disable lots of things that dont show up in task manager and delay a few that I do use but don't need right away